How Silicon Valley Perfected Ice Cream

There is very good ice cream in New York. Which made it all the more impressive that Joe Brent was standing in line, insulated bag in hand, at a San Francisco ice cream shop called Smitten. He ordered two pints to go – one vanilla, the other salted caramel – for the five-plus hour trip back East. “It’s for my wife,” Brent, who was in town playing mandolin with the San Francisco Symphony (Stravinsky piece) said. “We think it’s the best ice cream in the world.”

Smitten founder Robyn Sue Fisher smiled broadly at hearing the unprompted testimonial. Making the best ice cream in the world was exactly her goal when she left Stanford’s Graduate School of Business a few years back. Based on the line that snaked out the door on a recent visit to Smitten’s Hayes Valley outpost, and the 17,000 people they serve a month, she’s on her way.

The ice cream business isn’t exactly the natural course for graduates of the West Coast’s most illustrious business school. Getting into venture capital, starting a tech company, maybe dabbling in Wall Street, those are all par for the Stanford MBA course, but starting a company by selling sweet treats from the back of a kid’s little red wagon – not so much.

Still, Smitten in many ways is a classic Silicon Valley startup, leveraging hardware and software to make something better (though not faster or cheaper). With some engineering help, Fisher, 34, has developed a machine that uses liquid nitrogen, two interlocking helical-shaped scrapers and some smart software to make on-demand portions of ice cream in 60 to 90 seconds. And it is stunningly good.

Wired Business caught up with Fisher to talk about eating ice cream for breakfast; what she didn’t learn in grad school; and why making good ice cream is all about the ice crystals.

Wired: San Francisco is freezing most of the time; it’s the last place you would think to start an ice cream business. Why here?
Robyn Sue Fisher: San Franciscans are such a critical food audience. I figured if we could be seen as quality in their eyes, we could make it work. If I could make it here, then it was a good test of the concept.
Wired: Why ice cream? You aren’t some scion of a dairy family are you?Fisher: No, that would be cool if that were true. I grew up in Boston; my family is not in the dairy business; but I have always loved ice cream. When I was a kid everyone joked that I had two stomachs and one was for ice cream. I ate it almost every night after dinner. I go home and there is still like 11 pints of ice cream in the freezer. It’s part of my family’s habits.
Wired: Did you at least study some food-related discipline?Fisher: Nope, I studied psychology at Williams and played basketball. I was a shooting guard.
Wired: What was your highest scoring game?Fisher: 19 points, I think. Not so good.
Wired: So you try management consulting after school, decide it’s not your thing, end up at Stanford’s GSB and you go back to your first love – ice cream – as an entrepreneurial venture?Fisher: Absolutely. At Stanford I got pretty nerdy about ice cream, and I identified two things that created two ‘aha’ moments for me.

It’s kind of depressing that ice cream today, the product I love, is so far from natural. And that is because of the modern world, and the distribution chain it moves through. You get all these extra ingredients that have nothing to do with taste. So that was one realization I had. The other thing I got real nerdy about was the science about ice cream and the formation of ice crystals, and that is the key to the perfect product.

Wired: I know ice cream is cold, but what does the nature of ice crystals have to do with how good the ice cream is?Fisher: The general gist of it is freezing speed makes all the difference in crystal size, and the smaller, the better for mouth taste and creaminess. Freezing speed is correlated with freezing temperature. So if you can freeze it really, really cold, you can get smaller ice crystals.

And if you can freeze really cold, you can freeze really fast. The benefit of that is if you make small enough batches you can freeze to order. Therefore you don’t need any of those extra ingredients that make ice cream far from natural.

Wired: So you turned to liquid nitrogen to get your ice cream base really cold, really fast?Fisher: I went to a welding supply story and got a 35-liter tank of liquid nitrogen, put a baseball cap on it and called it Ken after the guy who rented it to me. So with a big welding glove and goggles I started making ice cream in my backyard at Stanford.

At that point I figured I’ll just get a Kitchen-Aid mixer and pour liquid nitrogen in it and be done. That didn’t do it, so I ordered a bunch of mixing parts off of Craigslist and figured one of them had to work.

Wired: Did you find one?Fisher: No, I learned pretty quickly that an existing mixer wasn’t going to do the job. They can all make ice-cream, but it’s not very good because they are made for bread or for whisking and they are not designed to scrape the ice cream in the right way. It was clumpy, or got over-frozen and became gritty. At that point I realized this thing that I wanted didn’t exist. Science showed that it was possible, but I needed to make my own machine.
Wired: So you are about to graduate from Stanford GSB, you have a general concept about how an ice cream machine could work, but no machine. Did you have a backup plan?Fisher: Sort of. At that point I had applied for two jobs. I had applied to Ideo because I thought Ideo was doing more of what I was interested in, and I applied to the FBI to the director of intelligence to be a special agent. I got rejected from Ideo because I had no design experience, which was totally true. I was accepted to the FBI.
Wired: So it was the old FBI or ice cream choice?Fisher: Yeah, I thought it would be interesting to work for the FBI, but as I thought about it, I don’t like D.C. and I don’t like bureaucracy. My parents are super supportive, but they probably thought I was insane when I graduated from Stanford and told them, ‘I am going to build an ice cream machine.’
Wired: But you did it. How did you pull it off?Fisher: I found an engineer who was a friend’s father’s friend’s friend, and he was willing to work for equity. It was perfect because I had no money and I was paying off business school. We spent the next two years in his basement shop prototyping.

Wired: What was the main problem you needed to solve?Fisher: We needed figure out a design that would scrape every surface. So we looked at things like snowplows and airplanes, how do they get snow off their windows? We basically looked at everything that had to deal with severe cold and how they did it. We actually had a snow plow design for a while. It was shaped like a snow plow and would go in a circle, but the ice cream just kept piling up on itself and got harder and harder.

The idea we eventually patented was the double helical thing. The two helices are scraping around each other, and also going around the bowl. Nothing can stick because everything is in constant motion.

Robyn Fisher with her liquid nitrogen fueled ice cream rig on the streets of San Francisco in the early days of Smittten. Photo: Courtesy Robyn Fisher

Wired: So you had the mechanics down; what about the smarts of the machine?Fisher: We developed some algorithms to help automate the process. Today, the operator presses their control buttons – and the machine knows it’s chocolate, and a medium serving. It has its algorithms and gets constant feedback so it doses the mixture with liquid nitrogen based on that feedback and stops when it is done, somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds.

Wired: Now you can make your perfectly frozen ice cream, but how do you make it taste perfect?Fisher: I brought in a chef, Robyn Lenzi. She started to focus on flavors, and is still our chef.

Wired: When you launched it was sort of a pirate ice cream enterprise wasn’t it? Not strictly legal?Fisher: At that time I started getting my ice cream out there in 2009, all these chefs had been laid off from restaurants. So they went to the streets to sell their food, and I joined them. We used Twitter and Facebook and about 12 of us would set up in a park or on the street and say “come and get it before the cops come.” It was totally not legal. We would get hundreds of people coming, and it was amazing. I learned so much from all of those street food chefs about pricing, marketing all sorts of things.
Wired: What’s next? More stores? Are you going to start serving other kinds of food?Fisher: We’ve got two more stores in the works. We are not interested in franchising. We are not interested in making big bucks fast, and going down the tubes. I talked to James Freeman from Blue Bottle Coffee a ton. We are like the Blue Bottle of ice cream. That’s why I picked this alleyway to launch (Blue Bottle in its early days was a cart in an alley), I figured if people got Blue Bottle, they would get us. We have a roll out plan. It’s just a quality first roll out plan. It’s Bay Area first and then slowly expand beyond that, south and north first. I would like to guarantee that one day we’ll get to New York, but I can’t guarantee anything, but I hope we do.

As far as other food, we aren’t going to try to beat someone else at something we aren’t as good at. If we were ever to think about doing coffee we would talk to James and Blue Bottle, someone who does that the best in the world. We are adding a few things, though.
Wired: Like what?Fisher: Brioche ice-cream sandwiches. If you put our ice cream on a cookie and try to serve it, it will squish out. So since we can’t use cookies our chef is coming up with an amazing recipe for a really sweet brioche ice cream sandwich. So when you bite into it, it will squish around it. It will be almost like eating a sandwich. It’s going to be amazing.